Last Saturday, I sat in a room full of strangers — reporters, artists, dancers, entrepreneurs — and watched a love story destroy itself in real time.
It was an opera appreciation evening hosted by a Korean community. The work: Cavalleria Rusticana by Pietro Mascagni. I had never really experienced opera before — not like this, with someone explaining the context in real time, the history, the irony baked into every scene.
The story is set on Easter Sunday morning in a Sicilian village. While the townspeople celebrate resurrection and new life inside the church, outside — a love triangle is unraveling. Betrayal. Jealousy. A duel. A death.
The whole opera runs on one devastating tension: sacred and profane, happening simultaneously, in the same space.
"The church doors are open. But not everyone inside is praying."
As I watched, I kept coming back to a question the speaker posed — almost quietly, almost to himself:
Is the person in front of you leading you toward light and life? Or toward destruction?
The characters in Cavalleria Rusticana don't ask this question. They just act. Turiddu chases what feels urgent. Santuzza loves what she can't keep. Alfio defends what was already lost. No one pauses. No one chooses consciously.
And that, I think, is where most of us live too — especially in high-pressure roles. We don't stop to audit the relationships around us. We assume that because someone is present, or loyal, or familiar, they must be good for us.
But presence isn't the same as alignment. Loyalty isn't the same as growth.
"The people closest to you are either expanding your capacity — or quietly shrinking it."
This isn't about cutting people off. It's about developing the clarity to notice. To name, even internally, what kind of energy a relationship carries.
Does this person challenge me to become more? Or do I leave every conversation a little more depleted, a little more doubtful, a little more stuck?
The opera ends with a death. The tragedy isn't the duel — it's that no one saw it coming because no one was paying attention to the pattern.
High performers do this too. We optimize our schedules, our habits, our skills. And then we wonder why we feel stagnant — not realizing that the environment we're embedded in, the relationships we've normalized, are running in the opposite direction.
One question to sit with this week:
Think of the three people you spend the most time with professionally. After each interaction — do you feel more capable, or less? More clear, or more confused? The answer tells you something important.
Victoria Park is a Certified High Performance Coach (CHPC™) working with senior leaders and founders at Presence × Progress. If this resonated, forward it to someone who might need it.
